1.1.14-Pilferingapples
Brick!club Fantine, Book 1: Chapter 14: What He Thought Oh boy. Pretty beat after Family Outing Weekend, so I’m gonna keep this briefish and go get myself artdrunk until I’m sane enough for commentary on the few, the brave, the surprisingly funny posts made on these last chapters. Fortunately I can’t think of much to say anyhow here; it seems pretty much a reiteration of the last chapter. Which, Hugo, buddy, we just read it. The Bishop doesn’t challenge doctrine, he just focuses his attention on the part he understands, “Love one another”. A good part to focus on, but…well, we KNEW this already. And there’s no charming spider-story in this chapter to make it more interesting (I like spiders, okay). I am sort of cracking up over the whole digression about men of genius musing on the absolute. “There are men-but are they men- who clearly discern beyond the horizon of dreaming the heights of the Absolute.” Are they men, indeed, you tell us, Hugo, because you end up throwing a lot of confusing metaphors into that pot when the time comes. Seriously, because I don’t know how much editing went in to the final drafts and I do know LM was written over many many years: did the two halves of this book even know the other one existed?!? I don’t know, but now I’ll at least be reading (much) later chapters with this whole rant in mind. Tomorrow: Fantine, Book 2! There cometh…A PLOT! Commentary Gascon-en-exile also had a Family Outing Weekend of sorts and so am honestly just looking to get this out of the way so that we may soon actually get a glimpse of our protagonist. I do love how this chapter starts with “Un dernier mot,” as if Hugo hadn’t quite learned at this point to be utterly shameless in his ability to ramble on and so feels the need to almost apologetically tack on this one last postscript. I thought about bringing this up last time, but after reading this chapter I’m glad I forgot about it. There’s some discussion here on the more-important-than-you-might-think distinction between the active life and the contemplative life. In medieval (and to a lesser extent later) Catholic theology the contemplative life - that is, mediation upon the glory of God and religious mysteries - is superior to the active life - performing charity and other goods works. That’s the technical difference between a monk/nun and a religious brother/sister; the former remain cloistered from the world, while the latter do things like run hospitals and schools (like my high school, at least at its founding). Not surprisingly given Hugo’s socio-political beliefs, he reverses the hierarchy by praising Myriel for his active doctrine of love and excusing his inability to delve into the mysteries of the Infinite. The end of this chapter sounds very Keatsian, both because of its Romantic imagery (especially the stars, which also works as a Divine Comedy allusion in addition to the explicit reference to Dante, heh) and because the bishop’s comfort with uncertainty is essentially negative capability.